At Lady Molly's


At Lady Molly's is the fourth volume in Anthony Powell's twelve-novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time. Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 1957, At Lady Molly's is set in England of the mid-1930s and is essentially a comedy of manners, but in the background, the rise of Hitler and of worldwide Fascism are not ignored. The driving theme of At Lady Molly's is married life; marriages – as practised or mooted – among the narrator's acquaintances in bohemian society and the landed classes are pondered. Meanwhile, the career moves of various characters are advanced, checked or put on hold.
The portrait of the aristocratic Tolland family is sourced in part from Powell's own in-laws, the Pakenhams.

Plot summary

It is 1934 and Nick is working, without great success, as a script writer at a film company. He gets invited by a colleague, Chips Lovell, to a party at the home of Lady Molly Jeavons. There he learns that Widmerpool is to marry the twice widowed, somewhat notorious Mrs. Mildred Haycock. Nick subsequently has to endure having to lunch with Widmerpool and fending-off questions from Widmerpool's prospective in-laws becomes, for Nick, a motif throughout the novel. Also re-encountered at Lady Molly's gathering is old Alfred Tolland.
A chance meeting by Nick with Quiggin leads to a surprising and rather mysterious invitation of a weekend visit to the country. Quiggin and Mona Templer are staying in a cottage loaned to them by Erridge. While there, they all visit the Tolland ancestral home, Thrubworth Park, for a frugal but eventful dinner.
Just as the meal is finishing two Tolland sisters, Susan and Isobel, arrive. Some while later Nick meets Lady Molly's husband, Ted Jeavons, in a Soho pub and they visit Umfraville's nightclub. They encounter Widmerpool, Mrs Haycock and Templer.
In Autumn 1934 Jenkins becomes engaged to Isobel. Erridge, wanting to study conditions for himself, goes to China at a time when the Japanese army are undertaking offensive operations. Mona goes with him, ditching Quiggin. Widmerpool's engagement to Mildred Haycock is broken off in farcical and, to most men, crushing circumstances. However, Widmerpool remains undaunted.
, in what is really a defence of Powell and his work, doesn't comment about
At Lady Molly's in particular but writes of A Dance to the Music of Time, "By the time he came to write the Dance, Powell's style had become almost antique, baroque – and that lifted the comedy to a much higher level than one finds in the early novels." Powell's early novels are described as witty whereas the "Dance" books are of a higher order because the style "had become much more reflective." Ali also remarked in the same article, "Coincidence plays an important part in the characters' many encounters. Yet, structured as art, the coincidences build up into a greater patterning."
Auberon Waugh took exception to this reflective style complaining of the number of clauses in some of Powell's sentences and attacking the use of "the diffident double-negative" as well as the "'elegant' or dissociative inverted comma." He dismissed A Dance to the Music of Time, At Lady Molly's not excepted, with: "As an early upmarket soap opera, it undoubtedly gave comfort to a number of people, becoming something of a cult during the 1970s in the London community of expatriate Australians. Perhaps it afforded them the illusion of understanding English society, even a vicarious sense of belonging to it. If so, it was one of the cruellest practical jokes ever played by a Welshman." These remarks appeared in a piece by Auberon Waugh in the Sunday Telegraph 27 May 1990, "Judgment on a Major man of letters".
One such expatriate Australians Clive James, has been widely quoted as holding the opinion that "The Dance...was the greatest modern novel in English since Ulysses."
Norman Shrapnel, in making a comparative literary point, at the same time attacks the "soap opera" idea, with the judgement: "He lacks what Amis and most of the later English humorists have possessed – sentimentality. That would have destroyed the work."—sentimentality being the bedrock of the soap opera genre.

Characters new to the series

Molly again met Cap. Teddy Jeavons at the car show at the Olympia and they later married. Living on, as Lovell surmised, about £100 a year of her own money with Jeavons not bringing in a cent the Jevonses' kept open house at their home at South Kensington, a social no-man's land where one could meet all kinds. It was at Lady Molly's that Widmerpool first met Mildred, Mrs Haycock. Nick Jenkins re-encounters Alfred Tolland and Mark Members there.
"What, then, is the central theme of the series? Creativity – the act of production. Of literature, of books, of paintings, of music; that is what most of the central characters are engaged in for the whole of their lives. Moreland composes, Barnby paints, X Trapnel writes, Quiggin, Members and Maclintick criticise and the narrator publishes books and then becomes a writer. What excites the novelist is music and painting, literature and criticism. It's this creativity, together with the comedy of everyday life, that sustains the Dance" Of the characters mentioned above, the narrator, Members—a poet as well as a critic, Quiggin and Barnby all appear or are quoted in At Lady Molly's.

Footnotes